1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to systems and methods for managing electronic conversations.
2. Background of the Invention
Computers and mobile devices are enabled with multiple networking input/output capabilities, including Ethernet and wireless (cellular and WiFi bands). These multiple data channels are now commonly used for communication services, including text, voice, video, gestures and other sensor data. These services might be carried over a number of different protocol services, including SMS, EMS, MMS (media messaging), and various formats that are carried over internet protocol based services and such as XMPP, SMTP, SIP, RTP, etc.
In terms of scope, SMS messages are only text based. MMS and other proprietary text focused message services have expanded their scope to allow richer user interaction and incorporate multimedia, including emoticons, audio, video, etc. In terms of person to person or peer to peer (p2p) interaction text messaging, XMPP, iMessage™, Skype™, Facebook™, Whatsapp™, Wechat™ and other proprietary applications and standards which allow for group messaging all follow the same standard models of interaction between two or more parties messaging each other:                1. Messages are sent directly between 2 or more parties via an available network intermediary or via a p2p networking technology.        2. People are added to the conversation or chat room individually by someone inviting them to join, usually a person creating the “room” or “conversation.”        3. The chat “room” itself may be given a label or tag, or alias.        4. As people are added to conversations, they may or may not have full access to the conversation history before the moment—frequently they do not.        5. When people are removed from the conversation, their history remains but they see no future messages.        6. The conversation or room, has no termination point, other than when people leave or stop posting messages to the conversation.        7. One conversation has no relation to other conversations        8. Messages are shared back and forth and synchronized between all participants, usually in terms of the time first received by the intermediary, though the time of send and previous message may be considered as well        9. Messages are typically linked historically with parent and/or child messages, and/or temporally related to messages in the same conversation        10. Messages are usually given a multimedia type        11. Tags or topics prescribed to a given message to label the message        12. Updated messages may replace other messages        13. In terms of providing an action based on the incoming text message, there is not a way to interpret a message as having an activity associated with it.        14. There are a relatively limited number of states the message can exist in, such as sent, received, read, and replaced, and excludes states that would be specific to the payload content        15. Text as a protocol inside of the message is sometimes used as a mechanism to send emoticons, play games, sending a contact's information, or find commands for configuring the elements of the chat itself        16. There may be some method to gauge user interaction, such as “is typing”, etc.        17. In terms of the interactivity with a room or group, sending message to the conversation always results in messages being sent to the same group of people that were directly added to the room or conversation—There is no dynamic element to the people available to respond—meaning the list of recipients is static, except when people are manually added or removed        18. There may additionally be some semantic interpretation of inbound text messages included in some instant messaging clients. The individual client may attempt to interpret the text of the inbound messages, such that when a date or time or location is sent, the client may attempt to interpret that information as an appointment at a given time of day.        
The systems and methods disclosed in this application extend the capabilities of a mobile, or other, messaging platform to enable performance of complex tasks and the use of the platform to provide services in a more efficient manner.